How Belgium Killed 10 Million Africans & Keep it SECRET for a Decade

On 15 November 1884, the first chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck headed a meeting he had called for.
This was to be a high-profile meeting between the most powerful people in Europe and it was to be held in Berlin, Germany.
Present in this meeting were representatives of Austria-Hungary, Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden-Norway, the Ottoman Empire, the United States and Belgium.
This meeting was later known as the Berlin Conference and the purpose was to divide Africa between European powers in a friendly way.
In this meeting, Belgium was allocated most of the Congo Basin region for philanthropy.
You heard me right.
In 1876, the king of Belgium, Leopold II invited about forty well-known experts, who were mainly schooled in the geographic sciences or were wealthy philanthropists.
With these people, he started a philanthropy organization named “International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa”
The most important word here is Civilization.
The king of Belgium pretended to the world that he was helping Africans civilized and most people in the world believed him… for one decade.
But the real goal was the rubber.
You see, the era between 1839 – 1925 was the era of rubber boom.
In 1839 Charles Goodyear improved the rubber production process called vulcanization.
This process modified rubber so that it would support extreme temperatures.
It was then that natural rubber became suitable for producing hoses, tires, industrial bands, sheets, shoes, shoe soles, and other products.
By 1863 bicycles had become commercially available and by 1900, automobiles were taking over the world.
Since all these products need rubber, Belgium saw Congo as a gold mine because Congo has a large reserve of rubber.
To extract and export rubber, all vacant land in the Congo was nationalized, with the majority distributed to private European companies as concessions.
These private companies then created what is later known as the “Red Rubber system”
The “Red Rubber system” is a system of forced labor and violent coercion to collect rubber cheaply and maximize profit.
The Free State’s military force enforced the labor policies.
Individual workers who refused to participate in rubber collection could be killed and entire villages razed.
If you don’t want to work, your hands could be cut off with the police taking people’s hands back to the stations as evidence of doing their jobs well.
On page 166 of his 1998 book, King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild wrote about King Leopold with these words;
“All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator … From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets … A village that refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river … Rubber causes these torments; that’s why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters”
Having disrupted Congo society, the people became vulnerable to diseases.
A number of epidemics, notably African sleeping sickness, smallpox, swine influenza, and amoebic dysentery, ravaged indigenous populations.
In 1901 alone it was estimated that 500,000 Congolese had died from sleeping sickness.
Disease, famine, and violence combined to reduce the birth rate while excess deaths rose.

3 seconds pause.

While Leopold’s atrocities against Africa could make anyone hate his generations, what is even worse was the fact that he was able to keep it from most parts of the world for one decade.
It was in 1895, 11 years after the Berlin conference that reports of mutilations and mass killing of Congo people reached the European and American public for the first time.
And still, Belgium didn’t leave Congo until 1908, 23 years after their king started killing Africans.
In all, as many as 10 million people in Congo lost their lives.
Many more millions lived the rest of their lives in trauma, which they then passed to the next generations and is still affecting people today.
3 seconds pause.
In 2020 King Philippe of Belgium expressed his regret to the Government of Congo for what he called “acts of violence and cruelty” carried out by the former king of his country.
But do the people of Congo need just an apology?
What about their resources looted?
What about the lives lost and the generational traumas they’re still dealing with?
Do you think Belgium should give reparation to the country where their former kings destroyed and stole from?
Let us know what you think in the comments.